Some mobile telephone systems provide advertisements to their users. For example, mobile telephones may automatically receive text messages when they enter a new location. As a more particular example, when a user's airplane flight lands in a new city and the user powers up the mobile telephone, text message advertisements may be sent to the user's mobile telephone.
However, these types of advertisements are like email spam in that they are widely sent and for the most part are of little or no value to the user, except when a user bothers to read such a message and by coincidence determines there may be some value to it. Such an advertising model is generally annoying to most users and tends to have a relatively low success rate in generating business compared to other advertising models.
For example, web search-based advertising models such as Windows Live™ Search are well known and continue to become more and more successful. A significant advantage of search-based advertising models is that the user provides keywords for searching for the information in which the user is interested, whereby the search system can provide relevant advertisements that are targeted to the user based on those keywords. Not only does this result in a better success rate with regards to clicking on an advertisement (when compared to spam-like advertising distribution mechanisms that are essentially random), but the advertisements are generally not obnoxious to users because they are relevant to the search.